Webmasters – The 3 Top Priorities for Website Success

One of the most lucrative business models of the day, that takes very little in start up costs, usually about $10 a month for hosting is an online business. Using a blog or static website is the best way to make money online. Webmasters build sites that evolve around niches or topics. With the huge amount of traffic potential and exposure the Internet provides, the possibilities are endless.

The online webmaster business is not taught in schools and there is no degree, most of us are self-taught utilizing the many free webmaster resources and free webmaster tools as well as free guides for websites and novice webmasters on how to make a website that teach and provide support for webmastering, Internet marketing and web design.

Many believe they need to know code to design a website. This is not true, there are so many great ways to build websites and blogs, that do not require any knowledge of code, programming or design, so most anyone who is willing to work hard and put in the time necessary can succeed online. There are also tons of free sites that offer website templates so they design element is much easier and there is no coding knowledge required.

Many webmasters miss out on important elements of web design that cost them visitors and money. These mistakes are sometimes in design, which is a sure fire way to send visitors flying off the site. Other times they are mistakes in promotion, where webmasters do not perform the required tasks for SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, which, when done correctly, is what enables websites to rank high in Search Engine Page Results (SERPS) and what brings the precious traffic that is necessary for success.

3 Top Webmaster Tasks

1. Building Links

One of the cornerstones of SEO is link building, which is where links from external sites leading to yours leads to higher SERP rankings. The main characteristic of the links is the anchor text. The anchor text must contain the keywords the site wants to rank for.

Many webmasters just add the URL of their site when building links or even worse irrelevant anchors, this results in the search engine bots associating their site with the wrong keywords, which results in lower or non-existent SERP rankings.

2. Good Website Design

Another task is to make sure that the website is designed correctly with pleasing colors and good navigation.

a) Colors – Colors are crucial for web design, for the look as well as usability of the site. A good example of this is the website that uses a black background and red or pink text or neon color text. This is irritating on the eyes and will just frustrate any visitors that come your way.

The best-case scenario is white background and black text, or at least a very light color background and black or very dark text, or vice versa.

b) Navigation – Another big mistake is to have confusing or worse non-existent navigation of all the content on the site. The best navigation is usually placed in the top nav menu bar, left sidebar or right side of the web page. The colors should also emphasize the navigation area, distinguishing its existence from the rest of the site. The sites content must always be easy to find and access by the visitor. The Internet visitor has a very short attention span and needs to find content quickly or they will leave.

3. Content

Lack of fresh, original and keyword relevant content is a typical newbie mistake. Deep webpages, those that have lots of pages are better for visitor retention. The search engines love and feed on solid content.

The more content you have the more opportunity you will have for exposure to the ads, affiliate links, blog RSS buttons and whatever other actions you want visitors to perform.